There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue.

I’m quoting from The Chris Hedges Report on Substack.  I have no expertise or particular knowledge of how this works, but I do know that when it comes to anything climate change and the various associated conferences that can involved tens of thousands of people, it is much the same.   Reporters are flown in, put up at luxury hotels, attend banquets and given press releases that contain information that is mostly untrue.

Then there are those who attempt to find out what is really going on.   When it comes to climate change issues, we are mostly just ignored and there is no war zone as such.   But I’m sorry for the eleven journalists killed in Lebanon over the last few weeks, I would think at least some of them were attempting to report the fact.  I find there are always a few, across generations, across cultures who will put themselves in harms way because they need to speak truth to power.  It is overwhelming.

According to Hedges:

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.

“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”

The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media is unlike anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.

Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.

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I have no way of verifying any of the information provided in this article, and I have no way of verifying the photograph featured at the top of this post and credited to Mohammed Al-Zaatari.